[Harbinger of DOOM]

Meh, thats true.

[Flipside]

If it makes you feel any better, I also have a suspicion that the opportunity to argue whilst using long complicated phrases play a role

[Colonol Dekker]

How do you know there are anti-grav drives in the FS2 universe?

Vasuda Prime command brief when the two horus' escort a zod transport before zod capital gets toasted

[jr2]

How do you know there are anti-grav drives in the FS2 universe?

Very easy... when you are flying with the Vasudans, take a look at their ship elevator... and tell me that isn't anti-grav.    PWND!

[Gamma_Draconis]

How do you know there are anti-grav drives in the FS2 universe?

Very easy... when you are flying with the Vasudans, take a look at their ship elevator... and tell me that isn't anti-grav.    PWND!

Actually, it looks like it has little thrusters on them. And the fact that it takes an elevator to bring up a fighter mean it'll take forever to deploy fighters and bombers at that rate unless they have more of those elevators.

[Stormkeeper]

They probably have fighter elevators, multiple, to handle rapid craft deployment.

[jr2]

Those thrusters very obviously are just to nudge it up / down / side-to-side as needed... the anti-grav counters the gravity.  Otherwise you'd see plumes of exhaust pouring from them.

[TrashMan]

It's a stronger argument than assuming the GTA knew how to hold a field much larger than a fighter in place and not think to strap it on to a fighter (or act suprised at the fact that the shivans had shields, not that they had them on fighters).  The technology is called an airlock.  You close one door, depressurize that area, and open a second door to space.  That, combined with standby wings, is more than sufficient to explain the launch patterns seen in the handful of missions where you see fighters launched prior to shields.  Note that you don't actually see the physical layout of the fighterbay on the Galatea, and there is no way to corroborate the design of the Bastion as seen to that. 

True...but do you really think the Bastion had time to go on a modification treatment? The thing that I don't see an airlock in the mainhall is what bugs me...but then again this is a game so WTF are we so anal about it? Dammit guys, we're starting to losoe it here!

[TrashMan]

There is artificial-gravity on Terran ships at least and the reason it takes so long to launch support fighters is that they need to have the pilots wake up/be contacted, report to their correct area for suiting, suit-up, get briefed quickly, choose a ship, customize ordinance, and do the same for the wingmen (if applicable), have all ships properly set-up, get into the ship, strap in, do a system diagnosis (to make sure everything works), power up life-support, power up secondary systems, warm-up engines, receive launch clearance, launch, and possibly receive coordinates to jump to!

That entire task takes a long while when you are allowed to customize your ship to the extent allowed... if you had every pilot suited-up and ever ship powered up and ready, it would probably take 2 minutes. In the above example, more likely 10-15 minutes. If Command expects the need for support, they'll have other pilots and their respective ships ready. Remember that we've flown back-up occasionally... we jump in after the real mission has started, meaning we were the reinforcements.

Ah..your'e refering t0 the Ready-5, Ready-10 and Ready-15 status on curent carriers, right?
AFAIK,  Ready-5  means wing is ready to launch in 5 minutes...Don't know how many wings are in what status at all times tough... I thnk 2 R5, 1 R10 and 1 R15

[AlphaOne]

Umm shouldnt there be some sort of constant cap and aditional fighters always ready to lauch? At least one wing armed fueled and ready to go in mere seconds?? especialy during wartime?

[RangerKarl]

About that shield thing, there is (IIRC) evidence supporting GTVA forcefield experiments in the blurb about the MX-50 (that bit about how it was ineffective against the Ross 128 energy array, or something). Maybe the hangar field is an ancestor or descendant of that particular line of tech. For all we know, the GTA might have been able to crack combat-effective energy shielding for small craft without Shivan technologies, via that tech. Could explain why they managed to pick up on shielding so quickly, they already had the fundamentals for it, they just couldn't build it strong enough to be viable for combat or so.

[AlphaOne]

As far as I know from Fs 1 some sort of shield tech was already available to the GTA I believe it said something like a batch of those shields was destroyed at some station that was blown to pieces by the Lucifer fleet. But i'm not all that sure about it. So do not take what I say for absolute truth.

[Colonol Dekker]

  Your apple stealth pie still makes me laugh, Umm RE: shields, GTA never had shields until it analysed the shivans and worked with the Zods to produce a prototype

[AlphaOne]

Then what was it that was destroyed along with that station? I'm sure that it said some sort of prototypes for.....errr......something were destroyed there.....! So....umm......what was it? Sorry I have not played FS1 in very very long time so mi memory is fuzzy as to some things that happen during FS1.

[Colonol Dekker]

Avenger prototypes maybe..........maybe the GTD somethingorother, It mentiones the escorts, a cruiser and fighters possibly.


:beams:

[jr2]

beamzzzz

[Bob-san]

I think we had the fundamentals of shield tech, though only "tuned" for our own test weaponry. We could likely deploy a "shield" but it could only take 1 or 2 hits of our own weaponry--useless because the bubble will take more hits off into space then onto the hull. Still--it would probably be quite useless as it is. The capture of Shivan fighters let us analyze their shielding tech and adapt it to our own and the Vasudans'. The Shivan tech let us tune and advance our own tech very quickly--that would let us retrofit the new shields into fighters meant to test the old shields, then put it into every other fighter and bomber we can.

I don't think we could deploy shields on anything larger then a medium-sized transport, at least until the end of FS2. We had Mara prototypes--theyhave immensely strong shields compared to our own, not to mention the incredible capacity for primary and secondary weapons...

Let's face it--the GTVA had to rely on the Shivans to beat the Shivans... we needed their tech to break even.

[Gamma_Draconis]

If the fighterbays had a extremely vunerable sheild during the pre Great War era, then it wouldn't be very practical. Someone can just fly a fighter there and fire a few bursts and all of its content will come flying out.

[Woolie Wool]

That sounds like a horrible method of deploying your men. I'm pretty sure they'll have some air support to take our initial ground defenses and most likely have some sort of transport ship, maybe an Argo or Elysium, land on the surface. That brings me to the next question, how do they get fighters and bombers in the air? Are there such things as hybrid fighters?

Perhaps GTVA fighters often have wings for a reason...

They probably use dropships similar to the ones in Starship Troopers. There were a lot of infantry on the ground in that movie.

You could make a hybrid fighter, it would most likely need two kinds of propulsion systems because i don't see something thats affective in space being efficient in the atmosphere and a jet engine wouldn't work in space. A pure space fighter or a pure atmospheric fighter would be much better in their respective environments.

Pretty much all space drives (except for Bussard ramjets and the like) work in atmosphere, but not all atmophere drives work in space. The GTA seems to use plasma rockets or something similar, which would work fine.

[foolfromhell]

Perhaps GTVA fighters often have wings for a reason...

Perhaps the wings are for heat dissipation?
It would make sense that spacecraft are built in space...